Charles Stross has some interesting musings on the intersection of H.P. Lovecraft and the sort of absurdist humor/horror embodied in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. Stross notes the interesting similarity between horror and humor in that you can take anything and then add either element — or both in Kubrick’s case — to any other fictional form.
The other odd thing Stross notes is the similarity between the Cthulhu Mythos and the Singularity in contemporary science fiction,
And it occurs to me that the Lovecraftian apocalyptic singularity is underexplored. In a nutshell, it poses this question: what happens when we take the human condition, and twist? You need a topping of gallows humour just to keep it in perspective: humour is a brutal necessity when you’re confronting the horrific on a day to day basis (as anyone who hangs out with medics can probably attest).
. . .
What’s the role of humour in this universe? Well, one might ask what Stanley Kubrick intended when he turned “Dr. Strangelove” into a theatre of the absurd: absurdity is generated by dissonance between a situation and its meaning, and Kubrick used it to viciously anatomize the process of atomic annihilation and hold up the petty and banal motives of its perpetrators to ridicule. But “Dr. Strangelove” didn’t laugh at what came after the bomb — it ended, on a double-blind ironic note (singing “We’ll meet again” to a background of mushroom clouds). The bomb was the punch-line of the joke, not the set-up. What happens in a survivable apocalypse? Lovecraftian apocalyptic fiction never actually explores the consequences of the Old Ones returning, let alone the human wreckage left behind in the aftermath. It’s like the Singularity in SF, circa 2000 — off-limits to exploration.
Hopefully Stross will write that novel — I’d certainly love to read it.